By its very nature, Borderlands is crass. It’s gross. It’s immature. The humor in the game sounds like it came out of a 9th-grade boy’s locker room… And that’s why people love it.
According to World of Reel, script writer Craig Mazin (Last of Us co-writer and co-creator) has changed his film credit to pseudonym Joe Crombie. It’s an old practice meant to remove films the creator doesn’t like from their resume, similar to the use of Alan Smithee.
Mazin cut his teeth writing scripts for films such as Scary Movie 3 and The Hangover Part II, meaning this kind of fare shouldn’t be too tough for him to conjure up. Perhaps the issue is that Mazin has been busy writing much more serious projects since then, like Chernobyl or The Last Of Us. Perhaps it just has something to do with the fact that the plots for first-person shooters tend to be fairly flimsy. Either way, things aren’t going well.
The Borderlands adaptation has been in the oven for a long time. It was first announced in 2015, and the principal photography for the project wrapped back in 2021. That same year, the cast was announced and we got pictures of them in costume. Ever since then, there have really been no developments whatsoever. That kind of thing is never a good sign. We should have at least a trailer or a release date or something along those lines by now.
Multiple writers have been brought on since the film started. Eli Roth, Craig Mazin, Zak Olkewics, Aaron Berg, Oren Uziel, Juel Taylor, Tony Rettenmaier, Chris Bremner, Gary Ross, and Sam Levinson have all taken a stab at the script. Not only that but numerous rewrites and reshoots have taken place since then.
The film is technically still in the works, but no news on when we can expect to hear more.